We’ll discuss all these features in depth below, but first, let’s look at pricing.

Main Features

Getresponse’s feature set is possibly one of the most comprehensive out there.

Not only does it provide all of the key stuff you’d expect from an email advertising platform – list hosting, templates, autoresponders, analytics and so forth, but as mentioned above, it’s recently been expanding the attribute set to the point where it is morphing into an all-in-one / CRM-style advertising and marketing platform.

The inquiry is if Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of none – let’s drill down to the key features to learn.

Customer Support

Up until quite recently Getresponse support was one of the most comprehensive available for email advertising tools: the company offered phone service alongside live chat support, email service and assorted online tutorials / resources.

Regrettably, the telephone service has been discontinued. Instead you are going to need to use live chat (24/7) or email support. To be honest, many similar e-marketing platform providers only offer these two stations – if telephone service is a deal-breaker for you then you may wish to contemplate Aweber, which nonetheless provides it (you can read our Aweber review ).

In terms of the quality of Getresponse support, I have never needed to use it quite often (a fantastic thing) but when I have I have found it for a small mixed bag (less of a fantastic thing). Some of those live chat support I’ve received has been outstanding, and I have not had to wait too much time to chat with a broker; the email service .

Some of the feedback I have from our readers will indicate that there do need to be improvements made in terms of the quality of service Getresponse offer. Much like a number of these kinds of companies, I anticipate it boils down to who you get daily. Get Response WordPress Plugin

Analytics

Getresponse provides some very comprehensive reporting and analytics options. You get all the basics of track – open rate, click-through, unsubscribe rates and so forth – but also to that you will find some very nifty features that are worth a particular mention, namely:

‘one-click segmentation’: the choice to identify people who didn’t participate with an e-newsletter that you sent and set them in a segment of readers which you may then email again with a different variant of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can discover just when most of your readers take action in your mails, and period your prospective mailouts according to this information

’email ROI’: by adding some tracking code into your post-sales page on your website, you can find out how effectively (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving earnings, and workout your return on investment in electronic mail marketing.

Per-user information – you could click one of your subscribers and see where they signed up from, where they’re found and which emails they’ve opened in the past.

Mailchimp and Aweber provide some similar reporting performance (particularly around sales tracking) however Getresponse’s reporting application is decidedly one of most featured on the market (it certainly trounces the stats choices offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

Thus far so good with Getresponse, but when it comes to templates, Getresponse arguably falls down a bit.

Regrettably, the templates supplied out of the box seem a bit dated; they aren’t as attractive as those offered by Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor (and that I slightly prefer Aweber’s offering here too).

On the plus side, the templates are very tweakable – you can alter fonts, designs and vision easily enough with all the controls provided; and naturally there’s nothing to stop you simply designing your own HTML email template and minding the code for this.

Additionally, there are tons of templates to choose from — over 500 — and they’re presented in easy-to-understand classes, so it’s generally pretty simple to find a good starting point to get a template and edit it until you’re delighted with the plan.

If you are really not pleased with the templates offered by Getresponse, there is also the option of buying a template by a third party provider such as Theme Forest.

Another thing worth pointing out seeing Getresponse’s templates is the assortment of RSS-to-email applications options are not very extensive (only 11 templates are provided – well short of the 700+ available for routine newsletters!) And some of them played up a bit for me when I tested them (2010). I finally found something that worked for me personally, but I think there are definitely a few improvements which could be made in this region. Get Response WordPress Plugin

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters which are delivered to your subscribers at intervals depending on you — you can set them up so that instantly after somebody signals up to your mailing list, they receive a welcome message in your company; a week after they could get a discount offer for some of your goods or services; 3 months later they could receive an invitation to accompany you on social media. And so Forth.

Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is an integral selling point – it offers one of the most comprehensive feature sets available.

You can send time-based or action-based messages; time-based choices comprise cycles like the illustration above, and action-based messages may be triggered by user actions or information, for example:

Unlocks

clicks

subscriptions to particular lists

changes connected preferences

finished trades / goals

birthdays

changes in consumer information

Lately Getresponse launched a new version of the new autoresponder functionality, called’Marketing Automation.’

This permits you to make automation workflows using a drag and drop builder – you essentially set up an’automation flowchart’ that educates Getresponse what to do if a user opens a specific offer, clicks on a specific link .

This kind of performance goes far beyond what’s traditionally been on offer from autoresponders, and allows you to create a user journey which may be customised to the nth level.

For a quick overview I’d suggest having a look at Getresponse’s video review for Marketing Automation.

It’s important to note, however, that these more innovative marketing automation features are only available on the more expensive plans – the’Pro’ plan and up. Get Response WordPress Plugin

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns which make use of landing pages will typically create far more leads in the event, rather than simply directing individuals to some (cluttered!) Website, they point users to appealing’squeeze pages’ comprising clear information and a clean, well-designed data capture type.

Getresponse provides something very beneficial in this respect that most of its rivals do not: a landing page creator (and one that’s mobile-friendly to boot).

Products like Campaign Monitor and Aweber ask that you use a third party (and non invasive ) landing page creating tool like Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp recently introduced a landing page functionality but it’s yet to become as sophisticated at Getresponse’s.

However, unless you’re on a Getresponse’Guru’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ program, the Getresponse landing page performance is rather limited: you can just create 1 landing page, that can simply be displayed 1,000 times per month.

Also, and above all, you can not utilize the landing page A/B testing functionality on the cheapest Getresponse program (whereby the system indicates a sample of your users different variations of your landing page, calculates conversion rates, and ultimately rolls out the top performing landing page mechanically ).

You may purchase the Landing Pages feature as an add-on for an additional $15 per month, however very frustratingly, although the add-on permits you to show an infinite amount of landing pages to potential subscribers, it does not consist of A/B testing.

Therefore, if I had been interested in the Getresponse landing page functionality, I wouldn’t bother with this rather half-baked add-on: I’d just go for one of the pricier plans (which I suppose is what Getresponse would like you to do!) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was ahead of its competitors for quite some time using its responsive email design functionality, which automatically corrects your e-newsletter’s template so that when a user is reading it onto a mobile device, the layout and fonts will be optimized for the device in question.

Most competing products have caught up on this today, and extend responsive email templates, but Getresponse is better than many similar goods as soon as it comes to displaying a responsive preview of your e-newsletter – you just hit on a’cellphone preview’ button to get a quick snapshot of your email looks like on a smartphone (see image right).

Not just that but you can’flip’ the smartphone preview around, so that you can preview what your email looks like when the screen is employed in either portrait or landscape mode. Get Response WordPress Plugin

Customer Relationship Management

Among the most frustrating facets of utilizing many famous CRM tools is the necessity to export information to CSV and back to your email marketing tool as a way to perform mailouts (or the need to export info from the email marketing tool into your CRM to include prospects to it).

So when I saw Getresponse recently introducing a new CRM feature in their plans I was intrigued – this could potentially do away with all that info exporting and exporting, and keep everything neatly in 1 area.

Initially I was not that impressed with all the Getresponse CRM tool since you can only use it to perform quite basic tasks: you can create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and track activity (emails, telephone calls etc.) with those contacts manually.

But lately Getresponse have upped their video game somewhat on this particular front. The CRM is now integrated with all of Getresponse’s email marketing functionality and you can add users into a CRM pipeline based on their action (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or activate autoresponders based on the accession of a new contact into a pipeline stage.

An example of how to use this operation would be as follows:

It is possible to add a contact to a particular point on a sales pipeline depending on the page of your site they finished a form on;

you can then send them a automated email tailored to that pipeline period a few days later;

and based on the action they took in regards to that email (clicking on a certain link etc) you can automatically move them on another stage of the pipeline and invite invite them to a webinar.

It is very smart stuff, and I can not think of any email marketing product offering this kind of tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this type of performance you normally must appear at dedicated — and more costly — CRM products such as Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

But, it is not all good news about the CRM front there are some big things missing from Getresponse’s CRM feature set.

The most glaring omission is email activity monitoring. Other CRM packages allow you to bcc a dropbox email address whenever you send an email to some lead or client; doing so keeps a list of the communication from the contact’s history. There’s currently no method of doing this with the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an simple way to send one-to-one emails to prospects or customers.

And strangely, when you click on a contact within a deal pipeline, you can’t see their contact activity — i.e., the activities they have taken (open, clicks etc.) with regard to previous communications that you’ve sent to your leads aren’t displayed. To observe this, you need to go out of the CRM section of Getresponse, search for your contact in the contacts section and click in their details. But guess what? Doing so doesn’t display their history.

Task management is non-existent also: unlike committed CRM tools, there’s no way to assign tasks to other group members.

Eventually, adding contacts into a pipeline stage is difficult. You have to add contacts to a list , then go to the CRM pipeline, include a deal and search your lists for the contact you just added. From a usability standpoint this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just be able to add a bargain directly to a pipeline and then enter the contact details of your guide or client at that point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. But that said, it is a new attribute and the stuff it could do on the automation side is remarkable. I am optimistic that this attribute becomes developed over time because done right, it’s possibly a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the platform.

Given that webinars are usually utilized as a lead-generation strategy, the idea of getting your email database along with your webinar tool under precisely the exact same roof is very attractive.

The pricing is also very aggressive also compared to based webinar solutions. By way of instance, one of the leading webinar providers, Gotowebinar, fees $199 per month to sponsor webinars with as much as 500 attendees; you can really do the same (plus a great deal more) with Getresponse for $165 (so long as your list size is below 25,000).

With respect to attendee limitations, the Getresponse’Guru’ plan permits you to host a webinar with up to 100 participants; the’Max’ program’s limit is 500.

You can even buy webinars performance as a add on to a more affordable plan: $40 a month buys you a 100 attendees limitation, $99 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit. It’s not clear what your choices are if you need to host larger scale distributions than that however.

A couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being particularly useful are:

The fact Your attendees do not need to install any applications to attend the webinars

one-click list of your webinars

screensharing functionality

free online storage for playback files

Ultimately webinar performance is potentially a very useful feature to have sitting on your e-marketing arsenal and its inclusion as a feature provides Getresponse a very significant edge over its key rivals, particularly when you believe that you can connect it in with a built in CRM tool (more on this in a minute ). Get Response WordPress Plugin

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the proportion of e-newsletters delivered that successfully reach inboxes – is always a very important point to check at when choosing an email marketing instrument.

Not all email advertising providers are that forthright in their deliverability prices; but Getresponse seems reasonably open about that, with this to say about it on their website:

At GetResponse we are often asked about the quality of the deliverability rate. Because deliverability depends on many factors, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For all our customers collectively, however, we are proud to say our overall deliverability rate currently stands at 99%.

Clearly you’re going to have to choose the company’s term for this, but supposing it’s true, it is a fantastic rate and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails that you send using Getresponse will achieve their intended recipients.

What’s more, Getresponse really provides you the deliverability rate of each message in your email analytics – that is something that I have not encountered on competing products’ metrics. A thumbs up for this.

I really do need to pull Getresponse up on something concerning deliverability however: to ensure a high deliverability rate, it’s advisable to use a system named DKIM email authentication. You can use DKIM with Getresponse – but just on the costlier Getresponse’Max’ programs.

Although I’ve not struck any deliverability difficulties using the cheaper plans, competing products do not make you invest in a more expensive strategy to avail of this feature — it’d be good to see Getresponse becoming more generous here.

Email Opt-in

There are two approaches you can use to add subscribers to a mailing list: having a’only opt-in’ or a’double opt-in’ process.

If you use use a single opt-in procedure, the person registering to your own mailing list is added to your mailing list the moment they hit the submit button on your sign up form.

With a double opt-in procedure, the individual registering to your record is sent an email containing a confirmation link that s/he must click before being subscribed.

The main benefit of one sampling procedure is that it makes it very simple for users to sign up for a mailing list; additionally, it generally increases conversion speed and therefore the number of subscribers on your record. A dual opt-in process is better for verifying that the folks subscribing to your record are using real email addresses and leads to cleaner information and more precise stats (because open rates etc. are calculated based on a list containing only email addresses).

Now, the fantastic news here is that Getresponse allows you to take advantage of either opt-in approach – this isn’t true with all competing products. Thus a thumbs up for Getresponse to be flexible about this.

Collecting Data

There are two ways to use forms in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form which you style yourself, or you can design your kind in Getresponse (picking from an adequate range of templates and tweaking them to suit your site design). If you like the latter route, you can add the form it to your site using a snippet of code that runs some Javascript to show your type — which may be shown in a range of different formats (by way of instance inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You’re probably thinking that this sounds pretty fine — but to tell the truth, I think there’s a great deal of room for advancement with regard to Getresponse kind templates.

To begin with, they’re not responsive (i.e.they won’t resize themselves automatically to suit the device they are being watched on).

Furthermore, no controls are provided by Getresponse to switch forms off or on on particular devices or pages of your website. At the light of Google’s new approach to pop-ups (where websites can take a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on mobile devices) this really is a bit of a concern.

To get around this, I normally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do using HTML embeded forms which I design myself, and also for popups I link my Getresponse into a growth-hacking tool called Sumo (that allows me to change pop-ups off for mobile users, in addition to display forms exactly as I’d love to and on the webpages I need ). Get Response WordPress Plugin

UI Experience

On the whole, Getresponse is pretty straightforward to use. It is certainly easy enough to do all of the fundamentals: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check statistics and the interface is pretty clean and intuitive.

With regards to how it stacks up against its competitors in this regard, I would assert that Campaign Monitor is a tiny bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp has a slicker user interface (although one which makes locating certain performance a bit tricky at times).

One area I feel that might be significantly better in the user-friendliness point of view is that the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible approach to make blocks of articles and transfer them about an e-newsletter, in practice it’s quite clunky to use and may cause accidental deletion of content, or positioning of it at the incorrect portion of the e-newsletter.

If you’re able to get your head about it, and practice using it a bit, it does result in a helpful tool – it’s just that the execution of it could be rather better.

Additionally, as explained above, the CRM instrument could be better from a usability point of view — adding contacts to deals can be unnecessarily difficult.

Free Trial

This helps you avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for that trial and now I’m getting charged for a commodity that I don’t use” scenario.

The only down side to the free trial is the fact that it limits the amount of subscribers it is possible to send to 1000. It would be useful if that could be increased a bit, as it might help potential users try the tool out in more’real world’ scenarios.

Pricing

There are three chief types of Getresponse pricing strategy -‘Email’,’Pro’ and’Max’ — and inside each of these, several additional types of plan to choose from (all based on record size).

Substantial discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 months of support (18% and 30% respectively) — those are considerably more generous than many competing platforms. Get Response WordPress Plugin

Distinctions of Each Strategy

All the Getresponse plans cover the significant fundamentals — key features include:

The capacity to export, grow and host an email database

a wide range of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email layouts

split testing

comprehensive reporting

RSS / site to-email performance

comprehensive segmentation alternatives

societal sharing programs

There are a number of differences between the’Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ programs but for me the main ones are:

landing pages – you can only avail of all landing pages that allow split testing and unlimited views if you’re on a’Guru’ program or higher

Webinars – that functionality isn’t accessible at all around the’Email’ plan and the amount of webinar attendees is capped for the’Pro’ and’Max’ plans at 100, 500 respectively (it is unclear what the limitation is about the’Enterprise’ plan).

Users – you can have just one user account on the’Email’ program; by comparison you get 3 on’Pro’, 5 ‘Max’ and 10 on’Enterprise’.

Pricing Vs Competitors

So long as you’re happy to use one of the entry-level’Email’ programs, the pay-per-month Getresponse plans are on the whole cheaper than those provided by many of its key competitors, particularly in case you’ve got a reasonably high number of email addresses onto your database.

By way of example, in case you’ve got a mailing list containing between 9,000 and 10,000 records which you wish to send an infinite number of mails per month to, you’ll find that hosting it with Getresponse prices $65 per month.

That is:

$4 per month cheaper compared to Aweber

$10 cheaper a month than Mailchimp

$84 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure is dependent not just the amount of email addresses on your own database however on how many emails you send a month also. If you are happy to set a limit on the amount of mails sent via Campaign Monitor (in the case above, to 50k emails), you can expect to pay a monthly fee of $89, nevertheless substantially greater than Getresponse’s.

The sole well-known service I can think of that comes from considerably more affordable is Mad Mimi, which costs $42 a month to sponsor up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the performance offered by Mad Mimi is nowhere near as broad as Getresponse’s or indeed the other products mentioned above).

Additionally, it is worth pointing out that Mailchimp offers thinner pricing rings, meaning that based on how big your listing, it might occasionally be a slightly cheaper alternative than Getresponse.

At the smaller database end of things, Getresponse’s pricing is really competitive too – you can sponsor a database comprising 1,000 email addresses for $15 per month with Getresponse, compared to $29 with Aweber; $59 on Campaign Monitor (unlimited send).

Mailchimp’s monthly fee to get a 1,000 recording database is exactly the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi provides a marginally more affordable, if much less functional offering for $12 a month.

Two final things to be aware of about the pricing :

Some competing suppliers — especially Mailchimp – provide completely free account for users that have a small number of documents (but these do not supply the full range of features that you get on a paid plan).

As stated before, if you’re ready to pay upfront for 1 or 2 decades, you can avail of significant discounts the other competitors do not yet provide.

So the bottom line is that Getresponse is fairly competitive in the pricing department. But what about features? Get Response WordPress Plugin

Conclusion

Getresponse represents one of the more cost-effective tactics to host and communicate with an email database.

It is also among the most interesting products of its type – because it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under one roof. It is hard to think of any rival product that offers this’all round’ proposition, and it is what continues to persuade us to utilize it for Style Factory’s email marketing.

Some developments to Getresponse do have to be made nonetheless, particularly where the email programmer is concerned – its drag and drop interface is much more fiddly and less responsive than it should be. A good deal of improvements could be made into the data capture forms also, particularly for consumers wanting to display them on mobile devices.

And from what I gather from reader feedback, there are developments that could be made into the service offering.

Overall though I speed Getresponse very highly – you receive substantial bang for your buck with this product.